NOT YOUR NORMAL SENIOR CITIZENS: HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY

I have to confess: I want to grow up to be Daphne “Smith” in How to Age Disgracefully, by Clare Pooley, though I suspect I’m already too late to achieve her style and her panache (not to mention her backstory).  While there are other wonderful characters in this book, from Lydia, the middle aged woman who’s “running” the local senior center (“running” in quotes because she’s far from in charge for most of the book), to Art, the former actor and current kleptomaniac, to Ziggy, the teenage single father, it’s really Daphne who’s the heart and soul of the book, who makes things happen, and what a fabulous person she is!

The book is tremendous fun, even more fun than the description of the plot might suggest.  In fact, you might read the summary of the plot and think you’ve read this story before, or seen it in a dozen Hallmark movies, but trust me, you haven’t. Sure, there’s a building that’s a combined senior citizen center and day care (already you’re thinking it’s too cute for words, but stay with me here), and the building is in imminent danger of being sold by the city to a private buyer who’s interested in making condominiums from it, and sure, the senior citizens join forces and work with the children in the day care (not to mention a dog who’s passed around among three characters) to save the building, and that all feels like a cliche, but what lifts this plot above the banal is the characters and the unique way they interact to make this happen.

The building is in bad shape to begin with. When the ceiling falls in on one of the senior citizens, one who’s in a wheelchair, no less, and she subsequently dies (not, as it turns out, from the impact with the ceiling, though that hardly matters), the local council decides the building has to go, never mind how many different groups need and depend on it.  It’s possible that the council had already made a deal with a developer to sell the building, but the disaster just makes it easier for them to justify it.

While the rest of the oddball group of seniors, and Lydia, who’s only just started running the program and is seriously lacking in self-esteem, seem resigned to the thought that this place is going to be sold out from under them, Daphne is not about to stand by and be resigned to anything.  She has just turned 70 and has just started to emerge from her self-imposed isolation, and she has her goal of making friends written on her whiteboard at home, and she is determined that she’s not going to have her best chance of integrating into society ripped out from under her.  

When you first meet Daphne, you could be excused for thinking she’s the equivalent of one of Fredrik Backman’s irascible old ladies (a la Britt Marie), someone who’s shut herself away from the world and needs to warm up and discover love and friendship again. She is, after all, irascible, blunt to a fault, and wildly opinionated.  She has no family, no friends, and no connections to anyone outside of her beautiful home.  And I have to say that she does change over the course of the book, opening up to other people, getting involved in their problems and solving them in her own unique way (and I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun by describing what her unique way involves), but do not expect her to turn into a sweet old lady no matter how much she becomes entangled in other people’s lives.

Her energy pervades the book and provides a lot of the humor and liveliness of the plot.  Yes, the seniors work with the day care kids to perform a nativity play that the council members come to watch, in the hopes that they’ll be sufficiently charmed or shamed that they’ll keep the building, but this goes sideways in a hilarious and painful way. And yes, there is a television show with a prize that’s large enough to pay for the needed repairs and maintenance of the building, and Art trains Maggie, the dog (also known as Margaret Thatcher, Margaret and M, depending on who’s taking care of her), so they can perform in this show and hopefully win, but this doesn’t quite go the way anyone expects either.  And yes, Lydia gets revenge on her patronizing and philandering husband with the help of the group, but that, too – engineered by Daphne – is unlike any other kind of wifely revenge you’ve seen before.

You know a book like this is going to have a happy ending, but you don’t know exactly how you’re going to get there, given the characters involved.  That’s also part of the fun.  Once you put yourself in Daphne’s all too capable hands and launch yourself into this book, you’ll be in for a great time, lots of laughs and twists and turns before you reach the satisfying climax.  You’ll probably want to age as disgracefully as these characters yourself, especially Daphne. 

AGED COMING OF AGE STORY, WITH BAKING: MRS. QUINN’S RISE TO FAME

Are you a fan of The Great British Baking Show?  Are you looking for a warmhearted read with a main character who, though no longer young, is still capable of discovering new aspects of herself and her world?  If so, you’re in luck because Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame, by Olivia Ford, has just arrived here at The Field Library and it should check all your boxes.

Mrs. Quinn is an ordinary older woman, married to the same man for 59 years, watching as her female friends lose themselves in their grandchildren (when she has none) and as her husband’s health deteriorates.  She surprises herself and everyone around her when she decides to take a chance and apply as a contestant on the prime time television show, Britain Bakes (you’re getting The Great British Baking Show vibes already, aren’t you?  I certainly am).

As she enters the high stakes world of baking competitions and television, very different from everything else in her life before this, Jenny Quinn starts to enjoy her newfound independence, learning new things about herself and her capabilities (it’s obviously never too late). But at the same time, these new experiences are bringing memories of her past back to her, including the only secret she’s ever kept from her husband, a secret that could, if revealed, ruin everything the two of them have built over the decades. 

Will fame bring that secret to light?  Will Jenny be punished for stretching her wings by losing the things that are most valuable to her?  Will this book have a happy ending one way or another?

I haven’t read it yet myself (it’s going on my list), but I’d be willing to bet the answer to the last question will be affirmative.  

Give yourself a treat without excess calories (vicarious baking is always a lot of fun), and check out Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame.

FIELD OF MYSTERY FOR OCTOBER: VERA WONG’S UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MURDERERS

The Field of Mystery Book Group no longer needs to feel ashamed for not having ever read any Agatha Christie.  Given that she’s one of the founding mothers of the mystery genre, it seemed appropriate for us to read her The Murder of Roger Ackroyd at long last.  And, on the whole, we enjoyed the book, enjoying Hercule Poirot’s idiosyncratic approach to solving mysteries, the numerous clever red herrings and distractions that made it harder for (most of) us to figure out the solution before Poirot did.  True, she’s old-fashioned (to be expected of someone writing a hundred years ago), but we could see the influence her work has had on modern mysteries (The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which we read earlier this year, clearly owed a debt to her structure and setup).  We may even read another of her works later this year.

But in the meantime, we had to choose our book for October, and we went in a lighter direction this time, choosing Jesse Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.  If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’m a fan of Jesse Sutanto, having loved her Dial A for Aunties and Four Aunties and a Wedding for their great characters and the laugh-out-loud humor of her writing.  While this book doesn’t involve the wonderful family of the Aunties books, she clearly has chosen another great main character in Vera Wong.

Vera is a Chinese American woman of a certain age, who has a tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown that’s just barely hanging on, and an adult son who just doesn’t seem to understand how to ask for advice from his mother.  Vera is dying to give him advice, whether he likes it or not, and his seeming obstinacy in not asking for her help annoys her, though she is not discouraged.

When a body is found in her tea shop, and the dead man was carrying a thumb drive, Vera grabs the thumb drive herself.  She knows she can do a better job of investigating the murder than the police can.  The murderer will, of course, come to her tea shop and she will recognize the person as the murderer immediately.  The only problem with this is that lots of people start coming to her tea shop, and Vera finds herself feeling motherly toward most of them.  How is she going to know which one is the murderer, and is she really going to be able to turn in someone she’s starting to care about?

This should be a fun read.  There are already copies available at the Circulation Desk, so come in and get yours and then join us for a lively discussion (our discussions are always lively, whether we like the book or not) on October 7.

UNSCAMMED: MRS. PLANSKY’S REVENGE

I’ve noticed a trend in novels lately in which older characters (usually older women) are underestimated and take advantage of other people’s misapprehensions of their abilities, and I am very much the audience for those sorts of books (I’m thinking here of Killers of A Certain Age and The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise, for starters).  Here’s another in that genre: Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge, by Spencer Quinn, and a charming read it is, too.

Mrs. Plansky is a delightful character.  She’s in her 70’s, she’s living in a retirement community she’s not terribly fond of in Florida, she’s recently widowed (and missing her late husband very much), and she plays tennis and is responsible for the care of her  98 year old troublesome father.  Her children seem mainly interested in her for her money: early on we see her son and her daughter both reaching out for large amounts of money (a quarter of a million for one, and three quarters of a million for the other) for projects which don’t sound particularly sensible in either case.  Mrs. Plansky is well set up; she and her husband ran a very successful business and sold it before they retired, and so she’s sitting on a very comfortable $3 million.

Which she is about to lose through one of those scams they’re always warning senior citizens about, but apparently Mrs. Plansky never heard of those alerts (or of the rule that you shouldn’t use the same password for all your financial accounts).  So when a plausible young man calls her up, pretending to be her grandson who’s just been arrested for DUI and needs access to her account to “borrow” money for bail, she naively and trustingly gives this person her account information, including her password, and by the next morning, she discovers she’s been completely cleaned out.

Because I really liked Mrs. Plansky, I found I had a lot of trouble forcing myself through the part of the book where she discovers she’s been swindled and she has little or nothing to live on, let alone to take care of her elderly and difficult father.  Neither of her children offers the slightest help, not that either of them is in a position to set her up despite all she’s done for them through the years, and even the FBI agents end up telling her there’s little to no likelihood they’ll be able to find her money and get it back for her.

They do, however, give her a clue: they know where these kinds of scams originated, in a particular small town in Romania, but they would need the cooperation of the local and national government to investigate further, and neither of those governments is particularly interested in eliminating an illegal but lucrative source of hard currency.

Not one to sit around moping, Mrs. Plansky takes herself to that small town in Romania, despite not knowing the language and not having any contacts there (and despite discovering quite quickly that the law enforcement is less than interested in helping her).  Through perseverance and pluck and a certain amount of luck, she manages to find the people responsible and, surprisingly, finds a way to get her money back.

One of the things the author does well is set up the background for the scammers, and even manage to make some of them reasonably sympathetic.  Dinu and Romeo, the two young men who are on the front lines of the phone calls, are being pushed into this business by their uncle, Dragomir, and have little sense that they’re causing harm to real human beings on the other side of the world.  Dragomir is a scary character, and his enforcer, Timbo, is scarier.  Crossing Dragomir leads to physical damage if he’s feeling merciful, and worse results if he isn’t.  Dinu, especially, comes across as young and naive, someone who’s doing the wrong thing but could, in the right circumstances, do the right thing instead, and it’s up to Mrs. Plansky to provide those right circumstances.

Along the way, Mrs. Plansky herself grows and develops as a person, opening up to new experiences even beyond heading to a strange country to try to do what the FBI couldn’t or wouldn’t do.  One of the more charming things about her is that she starts out somewhat naive and sheltered but learns she’s capable of more than she’s been allowing herself to do, whether that involves leading a chase through mountain roads on a motorcycle or hiding in secret passages of a creepy building to eavesdrop on criminal conspiracies, or even having a fling with a younger man.  By the time she gets home again, she’s definitely going to look at the rest of her life differently than she did at the beginning of the book.

Are there a few coincidences along the way?  Yes. Are there a couple of moments when you get the impression the author is deliberately making things a little easier for his heroine?  Yes.  But this isn’t a thriller where you’re holding your breath, waiting to see if things are going to work out or not.  You know going in that nobody would write a book about a character like this if she’s not going to succeed, one way or another (it’s like a rom com in that regard), and there’s nothing wrong with that.  In fact, it’s a relief to know, even in her darkest moments, that Mrs. Plansky is going to come out on top.

For a quick, entertaining read with great characters and a satisfying plot, check out Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge.

OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER: AN ELDERLY LADY IS UP TO NO GOOD

Sometimes the very title of a book tells you exactly what you’re in for.  A great example of this is the new book, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, by Helene Turston.  It’s officially listed as an international mystery, but I would put it in the category of “quirky”, or even “black humor”, and if you have a taste for the unusual and see the humor in extremely dark situations, this could be the book you have to read next.

The protagonist of the book, Maud, is an 88 year old woman, living in what amounts to a rent-free apartment in Gothenburg, Sweden.  She acquired the apartment when she was just 18, when her father died, and learned in the process that sometimes very good things can result from what look like bad things.  She then went through her life, surfing the net and traveling the world, living alone and doing what she wanted.

Now she’s 88 years old, a retired teacher, the very picture of a fragile, elderly woman who might even be on the verge of dementia, the very last sort of person anyone would suspect of resorting to murder to get her own way, but of course, appearances can be deceiving.

Maud is easily annoyed. She just wants to live her life her own way, and if people would just leave her alone, she would be happy, but no, all these different people keep interfering with her and she has to take extreme steps to stop them.  Take the celebrity who’s got her jealous eyes on Maud’s free and spacious apartment. Maud has lived there all her life, and she is NOT going to let someone else take it away from her, no matter how famous the person is or was. And then there’s the lawyer upstairs who beats his wife and makes such a racket he’s going to ruin Christmas for Maud.  No way is she going to let this continue. And what about the young gold-digger who’s gotten engaged to Maud’s former lover? Clearly the little bimbo has to go, and Maud is just the one to get rid of her. Some antique dealer thinks he can take advantage of Maud just because she’s old? He’s going to get a big surprise, one he isn’t going to like.

Can someone who appears to be just a sweet little old lady get away with murder, not once but multiple times?  Read the stories contained in An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, and you’ll find out.  If you’re heading towards an age when people start to underestimate you and assume frailties you don’t have, you’re especially going to enjoy this one.